Remembering Rose Ellen Part 13: The South Bend Years-Rose Ellen’s death

Rose Ellen lived at Carlyle Nursing Home for the next 13 years. I was 10 years old when she came to South Bend. I believe my sister Rosie did her sleuthing about two years after the move. In the next few weeks and months, our interest in the mystery of Rose Ellen was quickly eclipsed by thoughts and concerns of pre-teen life. With my few attempts to get information rebuffed by my mom, I stopped asking and stopped thinking about her until a few months ago, when Rose Ellen came back to me, with such an intensity. When she died in 1984, I was in graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington, studying Speech and Hearing Sciences. Rosie was living at home after a stint in the Peace Corps. Out of the blue one day, my parents told her that Rose Ellen had died. She went with them to her funeral. She said it was sad, no one else was there.

There is no gravesite to visit, no baby photo to admire, no one left alive that knew Rose Ellen. Now, I think of her often. I can even picture us working alongside each other, chatting and writing notes back and forth.

Family ties

I have been very lucky in my career to do what I loved. I found my work as a speech-language pathologist endlessly interesting and always challenging. I loved building relationships with my little clients and their families. I loved the developmental process unfolding and understanding how each child is learning. Watching a child learn to communicate is like watching a birth, every time. It is new, fresh and expansive. I used to joke that I was bilingual because I spoke “toddler.” It was enchanting work.  But, most of all, I loved playing.  It was easy to know when your “therapy” was making a difference because it felt like play.  You could feel it in your relationship with the child and you could see it in how the kids engaged or played or felt their emotions, how they reacted to situations, people and toys and how they regarded their world. But the one thing I did not like about my work was the physical environment. The hospitals, gyms and clinics I treated kids in were filled with toys and climbers, art supplies and stickers. But they were all indoors and often in very small “treatment” rooms. I longed to play outside with my kids, to use nature as the teacher, to use nature to challenge, and stimulate the senses, feel the warm sun and cool breeze.

All of my best childhood memories happened outdoors and all of my favorite times with my own children were at the beach, at the park, in the woods or walking through the neighborhood. My mother believed in the healing power of fresh air and sent us out of the house not to return until the streetlights came on. Working day after day over years in sterile, enclosed spaces began to get me down. I couldn’t help but think that my little kids could be feeling the same way. I was only slightly ahead of the times, as Nature-Based Preschool is now a national trend. When I started the Seattle PlayGarden, there was one other nature-based preschool program in the Seattle area and now there are many. How many of those programs accept kids with disabilities? Sadly, very few. But what a rich environment for kids who need space or sunshine and fresh air or big body play and lots to talk about?   Have you ever seen a child work with a purpose? They will work hard to fill a wheelbarrow with rocks, then move those rocks and begin again, with no prompting to “put one more in” no need for a kind adult to offer her stickers for her “work.”

Outdoor play is intrinsically rewarding, ever-changing, and requires constant adaptations and lots of problem-solving. Then there is the sheer sensory nature of the outdoors: the hard and soft, rough, wet, warm, constant movement and hum of the birds and bees, the ups and the downs, under and on top of that is all experienced in the body and the brain. I believe that all kids deserve an outdoor life to go along with the warm and cozy indoors, but it may be especially valuable to those who have limited freedom to access it. As my mother knew, nature-based education aka: time spent outdoors, was good for you. So did a group of educators that formed the American Nature-Study Society. One member of the society was a past principal of the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth, and the author of the article What Birds Have Done for Deficient Children published in The Nature-Study Review Vol.8, No.8, November 1912. The article is included at the end of this story.

Cyrus D. Mead’s article should be read in its entirety as it is such a warm, wise and wonderful depiction of how residents of the institution were encouraged to explore the grounds and to spend time “studying” the birds who lived there.  Stories were written by students about the original bird and nature experiences they were offered. The stories were collected and included in the Indiana Arbor and Bird Day Annual “Reader” to be used by other institutions.  It is lovely to know that the children’s well-being was enhanced by spending time outdoors. It adds a new dimension to my thoughts on how Rose Ellen may have lived. In the early years of the Institution, there were many such activities, actual “work” for the residents including farming, milking cows and tending chickens in addition to indoor tasks, lessons and chores.  From descriptions of Rose Ellen (crippled, “does not do a lick of work”, etc.), it does not seem likely that she was included in any of these activities, but just maybe she was able to spend time outdoors, in the fresh air, surrounded by nature and bird song. My mother’s binoculars sit on a small table in my living room along with her annotated bird book. I became a novice birder during the pandemic. There is a golden thread from little Rose Ellen that runs through her mother, Ethel, through my mother, Lou Ann to me.

“About three weeks ago I saw a hole in a little old willow tree on our playground. I climbed up on a box to look in the hole and a mamma flicker flew right out in my face. There were a lot of chips on the ground by the tree. I lay down on the ground. She came back to the hole and went in the hole and stuck her head out two or three times.

Then she brought up more chips and dropped them on the ground. Now she has a nest there. Now she is not afraid of me. I can go up to her and she will not fly away. She is tame. Sometimes she scolds me but I would not touch her nest, for I love the birds.”-Thos. Lee D.

The above story is one of many written by school children of the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth at Fort Wayne, Indiana. (Indiana Department of Public Instruction, 1907-08). Twenty pages of original bird and nature experiences of these children were given in the “Indiana Arbor and Bird Day Annual” of the State Superintendent Cotton in 1907-8. This material furnished the basis of an institution “Reader” now in the hands of the state printer for publication. The State Superintendent in his preface of the Annual to the teachers and pupils of Indiana said: “Late in the autumn I visited the school at Fort Wayne and found teachers and children so much interested in birds and nature in general that I decided to place as much space at their disposal as they wished. The result is more than gratifying.”

“It is a great privilege for one to be so fortunate as to come in contact with the sometimes keenly perceptive powers of a child to whom book learning comes with pain. What the bird and the bee and flower and nature rambles have done for the ordinary boy, they have done for his slower brother. They have meant just as much to the deficient child if he has been allowed to see them.” (Mead, November 1912)

⬦⬦⬦

 Nicole is a Program Assistant at the PlayGarden. She is a young woman with autism. She bakes for the preschoolers, waters the garden and fills the bird feeders.  She reads to the kids, has a beautiful singing voice and she is an artist.  One of her favorite things to do is to make lists. The lists may be 20 names that start with the letter your name starts with or capture a scene from the PlayGarden.

Carter’s dream job was to be a groundskeeper at the PlayGarden. He attended summer camp from the age of eight and spent most of his time watering the garden and playing basketball. He finished school and is now tending the PlayGarden’s one-acre grounds and garden. He sings and recites favorite lines from shows and movies, while he power washes, cleans the rabbit hutch and chicken coop. He weeds, waters and sweeps all the while, moving quickly and decisively through his tasks. One day, as he readied to mop the Fieldhouse floor, he came across seed pods from a dried artichoke flower, floating around the room. They looked like delicate stars. I told Carter I wanted to gather them up to save them so he stood by with his mop and said, 

“A single seed. What is the meaning of art? What is the purpose of beauty?”

Asher is a program aid at the PlayGarden. He has a superpower which is connecting people together. He meets everyone with equal gladness and curiosity. He wants to know how your flight was, is your son feeling better, where you will go that weekend and how will you get there. He invites all of us to his sporting events, out to dinner and to visit his other friends at the programs he attends. He makes sure everyone knows that our fundraising luncheon is coming up and that they should register. Asher takes public transportation around the greater Seattle area and I believe he knows more bus drivers by name than anyone.

Not all PlayGardeners are nature nuts, but nearly all are, in some way. They love the puddles, making bouquets, harvesting basil for pesto, holding a chicken or a rabbit, mud, lavender, cherries, pebbles, tall grasses, worms, butterflies and bees. They make statements about the wind and the clouds and have deep knowledge of many kinds of rain.

As Cyrus D. Mead concludes. “or the heart after all ‘sees and the heart ‘feels’ and the heart “knows” and a heart cannot be feeble-minded.”

Nicole, Carter and Asher have grown up in a different day and time than Rose Ellen. They were raised by their parents in their own home, and in Nicole’s case, alongside several siblings. They attended school and had “early intervention” and many many hours and years of therapy of many kinds, aimed at easing their way through childhood and into adulthood. They have friends and work life and community. Clearly, their lives are on a magnitude better than Rose Ellen’s. Our lives are that much better than my Grandmama’s and Papa Don’s, who had to relinquish their six-year-old daughter to an institution to raise, to merely “visit” her and “parent” her by weekly letters. The sister bond between my aunt and my mother suffered nearly irreparable harm and myself and my eight siblings, well we lost out too.

I shudder when I think of what Asher, Nicole, and Carter’s lives would have been like had they been born at an earlier time, a time when they would have been deemed “a danger to society” as all “feeble-minded” people were considered. Asher has a profound impact on me and I imagine most who meet him. He shows, by example, how to converse with others and how that alone, can bring a smile to someone’s face. He reminds you to live in the moment, stop and say hello and ask someone a question about themselves, to regard each other. We could all take note. I admire Nicole’s enjoyment of life, her drive to create art and her willingness to do hard things. Carter charms me every day as he moves quickly and decisively through the PlayGarden but sometimes stops to laugh at a joke.

But that is not to say that “all is well” for kids and families these days. If born today, Rose Ellen would still have been excluded from most summer camps, organized sports, private schools and her experiences out in the community would still be met with obstacles both physical and societal. Schools are still grappling with providing quality education to kids in special education and there are very few options of employment in adulthood and adult centers are sparse. Families continue to pay a huge burden to care for their disabled children at home, well into their senior years.

My dear friend and founding board chair of the PlayGarden, Abe, improved the lives of millions of people, through his work doing “political medicine”. He also loved the PlayGarden as much as I do. He visited every few days just to be there, to experience the vibe and to see, up close, firsthand the impact of his and our work. He had seen and done a lot in his 91 years but the PlayGarden always made him smile. So, it seems strange to me, that while we had worked closely together for years building the PlayGarden, we didn’t talk about Rose Ellen. That is up until just a few months before he died when I decided to try and learn more about her. He was equally fascinated by the archival records I was able to find. Having been born in the 1930’s and practiced medicine for several decades, Abe lived a similar life span as my Mom. He lived through the disability rights movement of the 1970s too. Our time together ran out before I could ask him the hundreds of questions, I have about those decades but I suppose, really the people I  want to talk to are my Mom, my Grandmama, my Papa Don, and most of all Rose Ellen herself.

Like most state-run institutions, the Fort Wayne School was demolished. In its place is a park. There is a plaque commemorating the institution and its residents. It reads:

 A plaque commemorating the Fort Wayne State School and its residents

The Dream

One winter day a long, long time ago, a little baby with a snub of a nose, was born. Her Mama and Papa loved her and marveled at her pink cheeks and soft skin. Her brother beamed with pride and then got back to his Legos. The family grew, each was accommodated according to their need and allowed to follow their own paths, play the way that felt right and learn through exploring wherever their eyes and ears, and hands led them. Things got hard, even scary sometimes. Problems came up and solutions were found, or not, and everyone went about living and loving. The little girl grew into a young woman who liked to sew and do embroidery. She made beautiful things that her niece has on her bookshelf now.

The End.

Works Cited

Bullard, D. (2009, Revided: February). Skeen & Haynes Family History. Seattle, WA, USA.

Fort Wayne Hospital. (2023). Record Of Inquest As To The Feeble-Mindedness of Rose Ellen. Govenment records.

Fort Wayne News-Sentinel Archives. (2022). Fort Wayne News-Sentinel Archives: 1901-2017. Retrieved from News Sentinel: https://news-sentinel.newsbank.com/

Huey, E. (1912). Backward and feeble-minded children : clinical studies in the psychology of defectives, with a syllabus for the clinical examination and testing of children. Baltimore: Warwick and York, Inc.

Indiana Department of Public Instruction. (1907-08). Indiana Arbor and Bird Day Annual Manual. Indianapolis: Burfurd.

Indiana Disability History Project. (2022). Indiana Disability History Project: Exhibit Eugenics. Retrieved from Indiana Disability History Project:: https://www.indianadisabilityhistory.org/exhibits/show/institutions/eugenics

Indiana Historical Bureau. (2024). 1907 Eugenics Law . Retrieved from https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/1907-indiana-eugenics-law/

LaBrecque, D. (2002). An Historical Perspective on the Lives of People Labeled with Cognitive Impairments in Western Massachusetts. West Boston, MA: Perkins Institute for the Blind.

Mead, C. D. (November 1912, November). What Birds Have Done for Deficient Children. 8(8), pp. 294-296.

PBS, F. (Director). (2022). The Forgotten A History of the State Developmental Institutions in Fort Wayne [Motion Picture].

Sargent, P. (1926). A Handbook of American Private Schools: An Annual Survey. Boston: Porter Sargent.

Senior, J. (2023, August 7). The Ones We Sent Away: I thought my mother was an only child. I was wrong. The Atlantic.

Wallace, R. (1958, March 24). A Lifetime Thrown Away by Mistake 59 Years Ago: Mental Homes Wrongly Hold Thousands Like Mayo Buckner. Life Magazine, pp. 64-72.

Woods Services. (2024). Our History. Retrieved 2023, from Woods Services: https://www.woods.org/woods-services/our-history/

What Birds Have Done for Deficient Children

Cyrus D. Mead

Past Principle, Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth

“The Flicker’s Nest.”

“About three weeks ago I saw a hole in a little old willow tree on our playgrounds. I climbed up on a box to look in the hole and a mamma flicker flew right out in my face. There were a lot of chips on the ground by the tree. I lay down on the ground. She came back to the hole and went in the hole and stuck her head out two or three times.

“Then she brought up more chips and dropped them on the ground. Now she has a nest there. Now she is not afraid of me. I can go up to her and she will not fly away. She is tame. Sometimes she scolds me but I would not touch her nest, for I love the birds.”-Thos. Lee D.

The above story is one of many written by school children of the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Twenty pages of original bird and nature experiences of these children were given in the “Indiana Arbor and Bird Day Annual” of the State Superintendent Cotton in 1907-8. This material furnished the basis of an institution “Reader” now in the hands of the state printer for publication. The State Superintendent in his preface of the Annual to the teachers and pupils of Indiana said: “Late in the autumn I visited the school at Fort Wayne and found teachers and children so much interested in birds and nature in general that I decided to place as much space at their disposal as they wished. The result is more than gratifying.”

It is a great privilege for one to be so fortunate as to come in contact with the sometimes keenly perceptive powers of a child to whom book learning comes with pain. What the bird and the bee and flower and nature rambles have done for the ordinary boy, they have done for his slower brother. They have meant just as much to the deficient child if he has been allowed to see them.

The education of the past has been too much the training of the intellect, for with it crime and vice, grief and bitterness have gone. Today, more than ever before, this intellect training is being balanced by a moral and an aesthetic teaching. Hand work serves its means rather than finds its end, but nature work and zoölogy of past days, taking the object to study its petals, its feathers, or its bones, but the nature work in the school of “feeling” and the school of “seeing”. This is the spirit of the nature work in the Indiana School and it has carried its benediction into the heart of the child as well as into the heart of the teacher.

Not so much is made of nature “study” as nature “feeling” and nature “seeing”. The father of Greek education said, “knowledge” was the thing. “Know thyself”. His pupil and disciple, the best-educated man the world has ever seen, inspired the present-day teaching by answering that mere “knowledge” of good was nothing, but a functioning” of that knowledge, a “living” and a “feeling” and a “doing” of that good. These children never heard of a dentate, stipulate, palmate leaf or leaf arrangement but they have “seen”, in the sticky horse chestnut bud, order, symmetry, and protection. They do not know and do not care whether the ichneumon fly is Hymenoptera or just a plain insect with wings, but in the collection of two hundred tussock moth caterpillar cocoons in one walk around their administration building lat fall they “felt” God’ protecting care for us through his placing this parasitic fly in the larvae of our shade tree’ ravagers. They do not know the difference between a sepal and a petal, but a boy of one of the upper grade schools took clandestinely a trillium from the waste basket under the teacher’s desk and pressed it in his book because, as he told her, “he could always study better with a flower on his desk!” A division of bright little chaps tussled and sweated hour after hour to dig worms to toss to a limb where a mother robin took them to feed to her babies. If you should tell them a “Troglodytes aedon” was in the Rose of Sharon bush outside their Kindergarten window they would stand speechless and dumb, but if their wren should “say his beads” as he never forgets to do, from his birdhouse which occupies its place close to each school, the windows would be stampeded without ceremony.

A “shrike” that built its nest on the north side of the grounds, preened itself, within four feet of its nest, while kindergarten children fed “bugs” to the handsomest babies of the world.

The blue jay was made to bury his acorns and ”sass” his neighbors from the limbs of trees. One was found once on the grounds hanging head down entangled in his own nest building. One Boy’s room took a morning off that that bird might be disentangled, taken to the fairground woods and liberated. Boys will fight, actually fight, for the protection of nests and birds when a few years ago wings of the young of sparrows were pulled off to see them suffer. The general spirit of observation, sympathy, kindliness, charity, “seeing”, “feeling” “love” has been studied abroad in the Indiana School and the bird is the progenitor.

They believe with Van Dyke, that “There is more of God in the peaceable beauty of the wood-violet than in all the angry disputations of the sects.” The, “We are nearer heaven when we listen to the birds than when we quarrel with our fellow-men.” They have felt with Ruskin that, “The greatest thing a human soul ever did was to ‘see’ something; that to ‘see’ clearly was poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” While they have a weak will to appeal to, it does not follow that the emotions are equally infirm; for the heart after all “sees” and the heart “feels” and the heart “knows”, and a heart cannot be feeble-minded.”